In August 1648, as the tide of the Second Civil War turned decisively in Parliament’s favour, the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Elencticus reported that a Leicestershire gentleman, Thomas Beaumont, had brought a ‘no treaty, no king’ petition from the county to the capital, subscribed by ‘divers hands’. Mercurius Elencticus suggested that Beaumont’s promotion of the petition brought little lustre to the text, claiming that he not only owed some £10 to his father’s serving woman but had also fathered a ‘bastard’ with her. Whatever the truth of these scurrilous allegations, the evidence suggests that Royalist reports of Beaumont’s involvement in the petition were correct. 

The history of this petition, perhaps the first of dozens that would be issued calling for negotiations with Charles I to be broken off and for him to be brought to trial, demonstrates some of the complexities of the subject of John Rees’s highly engaging new book. Rees’s work, in many ways a companion piece to his excellent study of the Leveller movement, explores the influence of the so-called ‘fiery spirits’, MPs who were in the vanguard of the war party during the English Civil War. The war party consisted of MPs and peers who urged the vigorous prosecution of hostilities against the king rather than negotiation. The figures Rees focuses upon – Henry Marten, Alexander Rigby, William Strode and Sir Peter Wentworth – belonged to its most radical wing. This grouping would be heavily involved in efforts to mobilise the public, first behind Parliament’s war effort and then in support of prosecuting Charles I as a tyrant and a traitor. The ‘fiery spirits’, Rees argues, along with their allies, the Levellers, were the ultimate architects of the English Revolution, leading a mass movement in favour of the trial and execution of Charles I. In this way, The Fiery Spirits convincingly rehabilitates the idea of the English Revolution as a popular revolution.

As Rees demonstrates very effectively, the influence of popular action was not felt for the first time in the autumn and winter of 1648. In the late 1620s, the foreign policy of the king’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham – notably the disastrous military expeditions to Cadiz and the Ile